foarp
mattsteinglass
The Washington Post yesterday published a crazy op-ed by a former Bush speechwriter named Marc Thiessen, who argued as follows:
Critics claim that enhanced techniques do not produce good intelligence because people will say anything to get the techniques to stop. But the memos note that, “as Abu Zubaydah himself explained with respect to enhanced techniques, ‘brothers who are captured and interrogated are permitted by Allah to provide information when they believe they have reached the limit of their ability to withhold it in the face of psychological and physical hardship.” In other words, the terrorists are called by their faith to resist as far as they can — and once they have done so, they are free to tell everything they know. This is because of their belief that “Islam will ultimately dominate the world and that this victory is inevitable.” The job of the interrogator is to safely help the terrorist do his duty to Allah, so he then feels liberated to speak freely.
The policy outlined here by Abu Zubaydah for Al-Qaeda prisoners is exactly the same policy that was followed by American POWs in Hanoi during the Vietnam War. According to John McCain, the policy established among US POWs in Vietnamese camps was as follows: you should resist efforts to coerce you into revealing information or making taped propaganda statements denouncing the US and its war efforts to the best of your ability. But if your efforts to resist are exhausted and you feel you are at the breaking point, go ahead and make a concession, the smallest one you feel your captors will accept, and do so in clean conscience, knowing you’ve done your best. Then go back to resisting to the best of your abilities. In “Survivors,” Zalin Grant’s oral history of the POWs, Air Force Col. Ted Guy, who was the senior US officer at “the Plantation,” the camp where McCain was held until 1970, describes the policy as follows:
I told them [new POWs who had just arrived] through commo that I had made a tape. I said, ‘Yes, they got me to that point in 1970 where I was very low and under a lot of mental pressure. I thought I could get word out to my family if I made a tape [denouncing the US]. The promise was broken so I quit. I expect everybody in this camp has a different breaking point, depending on how long you’ve been captured and your mental attitude on any given day. Some days you will be called in for interrogation and won’t be able to resist at all. Okay, make the damn tape. But don’t do it every day. Next time make them take you to that point or further. As far as writing, if you can write your family, go ahead, but don’t sell your soul to do it.”
— “Survivors: Vietnam POWs Tell Their Stories,” Zalin Grant, P.287
After he returned to the US, John McCain spent some time at the National War College, where in 1974 he wrote a paper analyzing the US Armed Forces’ Code of Conduct for POWs in light of the Vietnam experience. In discussing the Code’s Article V, “I am bound to give only my name, rank, serial number, date of birth. I will evade answering further questions to the best of my ability,” McCain wrote as follows:
It is patently obvious that if enough mental and physical pressure is applied in the proper manner, it is unlikely that any man can not be forced to submit to some degree. …The article states further, “I will evade answering further questions to the best of my ability.” This should mean that a deviation from name, rank, serial number and date of birth does not necessarily mean that a prisoner of war has committed a violation of the code of conduct if he is temporarily forced to “fall back” from that position and has resisted to the best of his ability; that is the most our country should ask of him.
— Commander John S. McCain, “The Code of Conduct and the Vietnam Prisoners of War,” National War College, April 8, 1974
Clearly, John McCain had been influenced by Muslim theology when he wrote this. And it appears that he welcomed the help of his Vietnamese captors who, in 1968, obligingly beat him over the course of 3 days so viciously that he felt he had been pushed to his breaking point, and was able in good conscience to record a short tape for Voice of Vietnam radio admitting that he had committed war crimes against the Vietnamese people and thanking them for their kind treatment of him.
Seriously, it never fails to amaze me that people can interpret perfectly universal human attitudes, such as the belief that a prisoner tortured by the enemy should not feel self-hatred when he finally succumbs and tells his torturers whatever they want to hear, as if they were bizarre recondite elements of Muslim theology that make Muslims different from you and me, and render it perfectly acceptable to treat them as non-humans.
Filed under: Music
…because I find myself agreeing with Michael O’Hare that OSHA should set decibel limits for rock concerts. However, I know that I am a reasonably not-pathetic old fuddy-duddy when he writes that rising deafness among the young and musically inclined must account for “the increasing simplicity and sloppiness of current popular music,” and I think: huh?
I give you the increasing simplicity and sloppiness of current popular music:
My article in GlobalPost on how a 68-year-old landscape architect and civic activist stopped authorities from turning a section of Hanoi’s biggest socialist-era park into a luxury chain hotel. With Ted Burger’s excellent video, too.
It’s generally awesome, but I do have the sense that DeLong is unfair in his trashing of Marx’s idea of commodity fetishism. He derides Marx’s claim that a commodity is a “mysterious thing” because in it “the social character of men’s labour appears to them as an objective character stamped upon the product.” Nobody, DeLong says, thinks this way; “Nobody I talk to believes that ‘values’ are objective quantities inherent in goods by virtue of the time it took to produce them.” But it seems to me that this is sort of Marx’s point: nobody does think that way. Instead we imagine the commodities to just exist in pure exchange relation to each other, paying no attention to the social web of activity that brings them into existence for exchange and use, which is the real human story. Basically Marx is taking a humanist stance here and trying to posit that the really compelling thing we ought to be looking at in our little fleeting lives here on earth is human beings and how they spend their time with each other, rather than the things they are employed to make. And I think at some basic moral and aesthetic level, that’s true. The problem, as DeLong says, is that the labor theory of value is completely useless as an economic yardstick, and leads one off into absurdity. And DeLong is also right to find here the roots of Marx’s sense that markets are fundamentally tools of unfreedom rather than of freedom, with all the needless suffering and poverty that misconception would entail through the next century-plus. But I still think the insight of “commodity fetishism” is a powerful one and that Marx’s move, of disassembling people’s reified sense of the naturalness of commodities and their worth, is a powerful one that often comes in handy.
Back in 2006, when Hugo Chavez visited Vietnam, I got to stand with the rest of the press in the reception room at the Presidential Palace as he delivered a rather memorable little speech on all the time-honored ties of anti-imperialist tropical warmth that bound the Vietnamese and Venezuelan peoples together. As I recall much of this warmth at the time had to do with Venezuelan promises to help Vietnam build an oil refinery (promises that haven’t amounted to much yet), but there was a lot of nostalgia going on; the occasion felt like a throwback to a few decades earlier, when Nonaligned Movement strongmen would get together and embrace each other and fulminate against imperialism, capitalism and so forth. Chavez is a very charismatic guy, the Venezuelans were gorgeous and beautifully dressed, and there was much radical chic to go around. Seriously, it was a lot of fun, and I got the impression the Vietnamese took it all for exactly what it was worth, which was not much. Anyway, the most striking part of Chavez’s oration came when he said both the Vietnamese and the Venezuelans were “people of the sun”, and this innate quasi-racial warmth would always put them on the same side against the icy imperialist northerners who sought to impose their will on the world.
Reading the news of Chavez’s dramatic volte-face and decision to make nice with Obama, you have to reflect on the ways we expected Obama’s election to improve US foreign relations around the world, and the somewhat unexpected ways it actually has. In this case, it becomes somewhat harder for Hugo Chavez to invoke the solidarity of the “people of the sun” against the icy imperialist US when the face of the US is Barack Obama. That’s surely not the main factor in Chavez’s decision to make nice with Obama, but it’s part of the overall gestalt.
I’m generally very attracted to the Dutch way of life and find many of their social instincts admirable, but this story of the Dutch navy capturing seven Somali pirates, freeing their 20 Yemeni hostages, and then letting the pirates go because Dutch law doesn’t allow them to be held on the high seas seems to me to embody a dysfunctional squeamishness about punishment and force that I think is a real problem in Holland. It’s hard to read this without thinking “Srebrenica”. So, applause to the Dutch Navy for its professionalism and dedication in capturing those guys, and boo to the Dutch legal system for forbidding them from rendering the pirates for trial, which is what should have happened.
Sondhi Limthongkul, the Thai media baron who brought down first the government of billionaire Thaksin Shinawatra in 2006 and then that of the People’s Power Party widely viewed as Thaksin’s proxy in 2008, was shot Friday morning in Bangkok. I remember attending the rallies Sondhi’s PAD was organizing opposite the Royal Palace in mid-2006 and thinking they seemed entirely oblivious to the risks they were taking to the social order. The rallies were vast, highly stagecrafted affairs, heavily funded by Sondhi’s Manager Media, with a huge stage, folk singers, simultaneous TV broadcasts also playing on projection screens all around the field, booths representing various NGOs and Democrat Party chapters, and so on. At one point in the evening, Sondhi himself came through, surrounded by a phalanx of strapping bodyguards, and made a bunch of confident pronouncements to us reporters; he looked like Lenin on the barricades, buoyed along by devoted followers and sure of his victory.
I thought of those rallies while watching the Tea Parties in the US earlier this week. In both cases, you had a relatively wealthy minority staging protests to deny the legitimacy of an elected and broadly popular chief executive, and in both cases, the protests were chiefly driven by a media empire that openly renounced objectivity in favor of attempting to unseat the government — in favor, in both cases, of another party (in the Thai case, the Democrats) that had repeatedly failed to win at the ballot box. The threat to the constitutional order was clear. And in both cases, it made me worry that in an era of vast accumulations of wealth and unaccountable media power, legal and constitutional structures may simply be too weak to hold. We’ve seen over the past few months in Thailand what happens when a privileged and selfish elite blithely knocks out the props holding up the legitimacy of government. I have little confidence that those in the US (“teabaggers”, FOXNews, etc.) who are actively undermining popular faith in the legitimacy of the US government will take that lesson to heart.
Josh Marshall notes Ron Paul‘s intriguing proposal for combating Somali-style piracy: issuing “Letters of Marque and Reprisal”.
“We shouldn’t put prohibitions in their way. We shouldn’t say that they can’t carry guns. Because quite frankly, I think the companies are capable of dealing with this. But it also raises the subject of the, principle of the “Marque and Reprisal”. The “Marque and Reprisal” principle was used in our early years, lo and behold, for pirates. And that means that, under international agreement and understanding, and a letter coming from our US Congress, those ships do have a right under international law to defend themselves.”
As Marshall notes, this isn’t really what “Letters of Marque and Reprisal” were. They were, rather, licenses issued by one country to captains allowing them to practice piracy against the ships of other countries, generally countries the first country was at war with. Paul’s proposal makes no sense because no private entrepreneur is going to be interested in a license to sail to the Horn of Africa and rob dirt-poor Somalis whose only possessions are rubber dinghies, outboard motors and AK-47s. As for the merchant ships themselves, they don’t need Letters of Marque; they have the right to defend themselves under international law right now. The reason merchant crews don’t carry arms is that ship owners don’t want their crews carrying arms, because they’re afraid of shipboard unrest.
But at a deeper level, Paul’s proposals seems to me like one of those moments that touches on the weakness of the libertarian project. Maximalist libertarians find it almost impossible to recognize that there are any problems created by individual liberty that can’t be solved with more individual liberty, any flaws in free markets that can’t be solved with more free markets. Problems with widespread gun ownership? Solution: more gun ownership! Problems with unregulated financial institutions? Solution: more deregulation of financial institutions! Problems with the private health system? Solution: more privatization of the health system! Even with a good as transparently public as safety on the high seas, you’ve got Ron Paul arguing that the solution is to issue licenses to private entrepreneurs. Because if piracy is illegal, only criminals will be pirates. It’s silly.
…undercut this anti-tax rebellion?” asks Josh Marshall.
Did the lack of any actual Communists in the State Department or Army undercut McCarthyism? Did the lack of any actual kulaks undercut Stalinist collectivization of agriculture? Did the lack of any actual ritual murders of Christian children undercut the pogroms? And so forth.
Paul Krugman noted yesterday that with stimulus spending, coming in “under budget” isn’t a plus — it’s a minus, because the aim is to get as much money into the economy as possible, as fast as possible.
Ahead of schedule is good. Under budget — well, ordinarily that’s a good thing. But the point of the stimulus is to increase spending! So if we don’t spend as much as expected, that’s less stimulus.
I’ve been waiting for the moment where I have a conservative-ish disagreement with the liberal orthodoxy in this time of crisis, and this seems to be it. Wasting money on government programs is bad, not just because it’s wrong to spend people’s tax dollars in ways that don’t maximize the return, but because in the long run it damages the effectiveness of government. If you want to destroy a government agency, or a regional government tout court, walk in, hand them a bunch of money and tell them you don’t care how they spend it. Within a couple of years of that, you’ll have a government agency that is no longer capable of performing its mission when it has to. And this isn’t just true of government; it’s true of any kind of organization when it’s made unaccountable.
Here in Vietnam, for instance, part of the government’s response to the economic crisis has been to hand out small end-of-year bonuses to the poor. Here’s what happened, according to my friend Martha Ann Overland in TIME:
In some cases, fees were deducted or the gifts were taxed to the point there was little left, according to local police. Families in Quang Binh province complained that they were required to sign receipts acknowledging they had received the handouts, but some villagers say more than 90% of the funds were siphoned off by petty bureaucrats. In the province of Quang Ngai, dozens say they were forced to donate to a so-called rural traffic fund. Other destitute villagers reported they had to contribute to a fund for the poor.
In principle, the fact that the money was stolen by officials doesn’t affect it as stimulus — they’ll spend it too, right? But that’s not the point. Corruption, like waste, is bad in part because it sabotages public confidence, which is one of the things the government is trying to build in recessionary times. And it’s also a problem because when government agencies can get money for doing unproductive things, they stop doing productive things. Ask yourself: if you were a business owner, would you invest in one of the districts where the money was stolen? Or would you invest in one of the districts where the money went to its rightful recipient?
ACCUMULATING PERIPHERALS 